Toasters,
Happily, the answer to my question was simple indeed (given that we're running a 5.3 variant of OnTap). The answer was supplied by a helpful NetApp employee, who apparently didn't cc the list with the answer, so I'll repeat it here:
options wafl.nt_admin_priv_map_to_root off
This allows me to have administrative access with my usual NT account (by virtue of membership in Domain Admins), yet files created by my NT account are owned by my UNIX account (not root) on the UNIX side. Really, it does seem to be the cake I was looking to have and eat, since on the NT side, the ownership of such files is FILER\Administrators, as would be expected.
I must say that the documentation on this option is a bit terse. True, the name of the option is almost long enough to be self-documenting :-), but the description of exactly what the option does and why one might fiddle with it needs some fleshing out.
Now all we have to do is fix all my users' NT files, since they're all owned by Administrators (root on the UNIX side) when we scopy them over to the filer. Perhaps the chown command is the solution here.... Any thoughts?
Thanks everybody for your help.
Greg